The Provisional IRA has said it killed 15-year-old Bernard
Teggart in 1973.

The admission comes after a campaign by family members was
backed by the ‘Relatives for Justice’ lobby group, and Coiste na
n-Iarchimi, a welfare group for former IRA prisoners.

The killing of Bernard, a mentally challenged child wrongly
labelled as an informer, was the west Belfast family’s second
tragedy.

Bernard’s father, Daniel Teggart, had been shot by British
paratroopers two years earlier as he stood in a group looking
out for their children when violence flared on the day
internment without trial was introduced in the North.

The British Army opened fire on the civilians, shooting several
of them, including her father, who was wounded in the thigh.

The army drove a Saracen out of the base, lifted the injured and
drove them back in. The Teggart family is convinced, based on
local efforts to establish the truth, that it will eventually
emerge that British paratroopers murdered her father inside the
base.

“It would be hypocritical of us to seek the truth behind why the
British army killed Daniel Teggart while remaining silent about
why the IRA killed Bernard Teggart,” the director of Relatives
for Justice, Mark Thompson, said earlier this year.

Mike Ritchie, of Coiste na n-Iarchimi, also urged the IRA to
establish the facts of Bernard Teggart’s death.

In response, the IRA issued the following unsigned statement
this week:

Following a request from the family of 15-year-old Bernard
Teggart from Belfast, the IRA has carried out an investigation
into the circumstances surrounding his death on 13 November
1973.

At the time, no formal claim of responsibility for his death was
issued.

We can now confirm that Bernard Teggart was shot by the IRA.

We offer our sincere apologies to the Teggart family for the
pain and grief we have caused.